The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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in its broadest sense, thus insists on the domestic and peaceful character of British mission. It let the British think of themselves as giving more to the Indians than they took from them.
“To Barter Gold for Brass, and Pearl for Trifles”: Missionaries and the Trope of Trade
When British missionaries and their supporters raised funds to convert Indians, they often did so by invoking their readers’ sense of Christian duty even as they evoked their acquisitive desire. Sometimes they attempted this twofold task directly, arguing that contributions to missions would enhance Britain’s colonial wealth. Martin Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, insisted in his SPG sermon, “For were we but wise enough to consider only the Advantage of our Trade in America … we should take care to propagate the Christian Revelation which … enjoins all those Virtues that make Commerce gainful, and prohibits all those Vices that bring Poverty in their Rear.”55 Nathaniel Eells, a minister involved with Wheelock’s Indian school, paired a commercial mission with a Christian one: “[T]he vast Consumption of british Manufactures among ym,” he claimed, “would teach the Nation how to make a Gain by promoting Godliness.”56 Although they would lose short-term profits through their charity, contributors to mission would enhance colonial wealth in the long run, turning savages into consumers as well as Christians.
Most missionary texts did not make so direct a link between charity and trade. Rather, they spoke through a metaphorical language that imitated the Gospels’ treatment of riches. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus emphasizes the importance of giving up wealth, because ‘“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’” (19:24). But he also relied on the language of wealth to emphasize the value of this kingdom: “[T]he kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it’” (13: 44–46). Such images allowed Jesus to use material acquisition as a metaphor for spiritual gain, even as he demeaned riches in the face of spiritual reward. These images also can be seen to equate material with spiritual value. The Kingdom of God may be greater than all one’s wealth, but there is a suggestion of equivalence in the parables, brought about by references to purchase. The Kingdom of God is costly and more valuable than all earthly treasure. Although it is priceless, it is like something that can be bought. Whether it is meant by its writers to do so, the Gospels’ adoption of a metaphorical economy can lend itself to an economic vision of religion.
In his epistle to the Romans, Paul also juxtaposes material with spiritual wealth. At the end of his letter to the church in Rome, he wrote, “But now I go unto Jerusalem to minister unto the saints. For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem. It hath pleased them verily; and their debtors they are. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things” (15.25–27). Paul’s formulation suggests not just the virtue of charity but also the imperative of spiritual and material exchange. Unlike the gospel parables, Paul asks his readers to take literally the exchangeability of money with spiritual wealth. Describing the gentiles’ charity as a debt for the Jewish church’s communication of the good news has the effect of placing a fulcrum between the balanced values of material and spiritual wealth. Generosity is there, but it is prompted by obligation. As Paul would have it, the conversion of the gentiles has merited material compensation to the Christian Jews.
Drawing on these references, many writers of missionary texts evoked images of wealth to make two claims. First, they communicated that the conversion of heathens was as valuable as it was costly, meriting donations and superseding in importance any wealth the British would gain from colonial trade. Second, they suggested that Christianity was a compensation Indians deserved for the wealth they had lost. Taken together, and read through Paul’s formulation, these claims could be (and eventually were) made to suggest a fair payment of Christian conversion for colonial wealth. A survey of the missionaries’ references to exchange suggests a gradual shift from stressing the debt owed to America’s natives for their loss of material gold to emphasizing the spiritual gold that England or Britain brought to America.57
John Dury stressed the expense and importance of conversion in one of the earliest missionary texts, The Glorious Progress of the Gospel, amongst the Indians in New England. He exhorted his readers, “Come forth ye Masters of money, part with your Gold to promote the Gospel; let the gift of God in temporal things make way, for the Indian receipt of spirituals.”58 Rather than suggesting a transatlantic reciprocity, he pinned his appeal on Christian obligation: “If you give any thing yearly,” he concluded, “Remember Christ will be your Pensioner.” The main compensation suggested for these contributions was spiritual. For parting with their gold the English would underwrite the Indians’ reception of spiritual wealth and receive the blessing of God.
Dury’s preface was written in the early, optimistic stages of Christian missions in America. By the end of the seventeenth century, especially after King Philip’s War had destroyed most of New England’s praying Indians, missionaries began to acquire a tone of pessimism and urgency.59 While they adapted images of exchange to their projects, they did so less to emphasize the value of Indian conversion than to stress the debt England owed America’s natives for what they had suffered. This shift may have reflected a growing familiarity with the language of debt, especially after the founding of the Bank of England in 1690.60 It also, however, was a response to glaring evidence of colonial exploitation, Indian demise, and evangelical failure.
In 1693 Patrick Gordon, a Scottish Episcopalian minister, appended a proposal for spreading the gospel in pagan countries to his Geography Anatomized, a cultural survey of the globe.61 Of North America Gordon wrote of the great embarrassment to England, “That those very Indians who inhabit near on the English Pale … should still continue in most wretched ignorance…. O Christians. Shall we covet and thirst after their Talents of Gold? and yet keep hid in a Napkin that Talent entrusted to us. Shall we greedily bereave them of their Precious Pearls? And not declare unto them the knowledge of the Pearl of Price. No! No! Let us not act as others have done in making Gold our God, and Gain the sole design of our Trading.”62 Focused on what he saw as the theft of America by the English, Gordon did not even mention trade. Citing parables about the Kingdom of God, he stressed the kingdom’s value and reminded his readers of their duty not to hoard its blessings. He sharpened this reminder by pairing the allusion to the spiritual gold of God’s kingdom with a reference to the Indians’ material gold. Rather than selling the idea of supporting missions by alluding to the riches of America, he suggested that those who have acquired wealth from the Americas owe some return.
Gordon drafted part of this proposal in a letter to the SPG, and it was transcribed into the society’s journal in 1701.63 The next year the SPG sent Gordon to Jamaica, Long Island, as one of its first missionaries.64 Although Gordon’s death shortly after his arrival prevented any sustained contribution to the SPG’s efforts, his publication may have influenced the society’s preachers. In 1704 Gilbert Burnet, the well-known Latitudinarian and chronicler of the Civil War, appealed to merchants, noting, “You great Dealers in Trade, who have had so plentiful a Harvest in Temporal things, from the Productions of those Countries, and from the Industry of our Colonies settled among them, are, in a more especial manner, bound to minister to them in Spiritual things.”65 As he alluded to Paul’s formulation Burnet told his audience they owed America a spiritual debt that could be repaid through the contribution of funds. He thus suggested that financing missionary work translated into a spiritual expiation for material gain.
Other SPG preachers, like George Stanhope, the Dean of Canterbury, emphasized the idea of spiritual debt by comparing merchants to sailors acquiring Indian gold with European glass. Presenting this image with reference to Paul’s vision of spiritual-material exchange in 1714, however, he reversed the usual description of transatlantic trade. Emphasizing the “obligation” of all Christians to spread the word of God, he wrote:
But this Obligation seems to be drawn yet closer, upon All, whose Fortunes are owing to any Commerce with those Ignorants